Book Image

Go Cookbook

By : Aaron Torres
Book Image

Go Cookbook

By: Aaron Torres

Overview of this book

Go (a.k.a. Golang) is a statically-typed programming language first developed at Google. It is derived from C with additional features such as garbage collection, type safety, dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types, and a large standard library. This book takes off where basic tutorials on the language leave off. You can immediately put into practice some of the more advanced concepts and libraries offered by the language while avoiding some of the common mistakes for new Go developers. The book covers basic type and error handling. It explores applications that interact with users, such as websites, command-line tools, or via the file system. It demonstrates how to handle advanced topics such as parallelism, distributed systems, and performance tuning. Lastly, it finishes with reactive and serverless programming in Go.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Using command-line flags

The flag package makes it simple to add command-line flag arguments to a Go application. It has a few shortcomings--you tend to duplicate a lot of code in order to add shorthand versions of flags, and they're ordered alphabetically from the help prompt. There are a number of third-party libraries that attempt to address these shortcomings, but this chapter will focus on the standard library version and not on those libraries.

Getting ready

Configure your environment according to these steps:

  1. Download and install Go on your operating system from https://golang.org/doc/install, and configure your GOPATH environment variable:
  2. Open a terminal/console application, and navigate to your GOPATH/src and...